Thirty years from now, as you huddle in the basement of your bombed out suburban ranch home, and you hear the mechanized whirring of the approaching killbots, you'll think back on this moment and say "I really should have gone Sarah Connor on those robot scientists when I had the chance."

Know what'd be really cool? If instead of investing so much money in things primarily geared for warfare with marginal side benefits for the rest of society, we would instead invest that money in things primarily geared for the benefit of the rest of society with a marginal side benefit for warfare.

ZipSplat:Know what'd be really cool? If instead of investing so much money in things primarily geared for warfare with marginal side benefits for the rest of society, we would instead invest that money in things primarily geared for the benefit of the rest of society with a marginal side benefit for warfare.

Scrotastic Method: Sometimes I feel like I was the only one that burned half an adolescence on MechWarrior and MechCommander.

You don't even want to know.

/Spent huge chunks of my pay as a young adult visiting Virtual World's battletech centers and flying tons of sorties. I was two away from my veteran pin before the local center got sold and moved to another city :(

/would pick it back up in a second if there were a center nearby. Hell, if I had the space and the internet bandwidth to support it, I'd build a tesla pod in my house somewhere.Get in the pod, shut the door

I don't think you need to worry about any kill-bot based on a bird that exists almost exclusively because it runs away.If you know where it's going (say, because it's pursuing you) it'd be fairly easy to topple and fairly slow to get up.This has gotta be a scout thing.

What you really want *for a kill bot*, are spider-legs.Resistant to trapping/snaring, flexible for climbing/jumping/navigating uneven ground, and with built-in redundancy to weather damage.

I can't be the only Farker who noted there were definite break points with respect to Mech weight and speed.

I know I've forgotten some, but the ones I exploited most often were:

50 tons x 6; this was kinda pushing it, as the 300 class engine weighed a lot and limited your weapons loadout. However, this was fast enough to outrun heavy Mechs that could outgun it, while powerful enough to really hurt light Mechs that could match its speed.